A federal jury has found Kanye West personally liable for copyright infringement after ruling that he unlawfully sampled an unreleased demo track in an early version of his Grammy-winning song Hurricane, performing it for 40,000 fans at a sold-out listening event at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta in July 2021. The unanimous verdict, delivered by eight jurors, assigned damages totaling more than $438,000 across West and his affiliated companies.
West, who now goes by Ye, was found personally liable for $176,153. His company Yeezy LLC was assigned the same amount. His retail merchandising entities Yeezy Supply and Mascotte Holdings were found liable for $41,625 and $44,627 respectively. The case was brought by Artists Revenue Advocates on behalf of four independent musicians who claimed the sample formed the instrumental foundation of the song without their permission or compensation.
The demo at the center of the dispute
The sampled track, a one-minute instrumental titled MSD PT2, was composed in March 2018 by four musicians who shared it with a producer. That producer independently passed it along to West. Several months later, the composers were surprised to see West prominently using the sample in a song snippet he posted on Instagram under the title 80 Degrees, which was later released as Hurricane. The track featured guitar, bass and keyboard processed through a crackling vinyl filter that gave it a distinctive West Coast hip-hop sound. The plaintiffs’ legal team argued in closing that the sample provided the undeniable structural backbone of Hurricane and that the composers were entitled to recognition and compensation from the moment of its use.
West’s legal team told jurors during opening statements that the composers had publicly celebrated their connection to the song on social media and had been effectively seeking a larger piece of the artist’s universe. The defense argued that West had voluntarily credited the four men as songwriters on the final released version of Hurricane even after the sample was removed, and that they had been registered for a combined 30 percent share of composition royalties as a placeholder during ongoing negotiations. The jury did not find these arguments sufficient to override the infringement claims.
West testified during the trial that he knowingly removed the MSD PT2 sample from Hurricane before the album’s official release on August 29, 2021. The version of the song that appeared on Donda incorporated recreated elements of the composition rather than a direct sample of the original recording. Plaintiffs’ counsel argued this sequence of events illustrated that West used the sample to generate revenue at the listening event and then discarded it once it had served its commercial purpose. The original demo, they argued, would never again reach the open market in the same way because of its permanent association with a global superstar.
A six-year fight and what comes next
The musicians attempted to negotiate compensation for three years before ultimately assigning their rights to Artists Revenue Advocates, an organization that acquires copyrights from independent creators who lack the financial resources to pursue litigation on their own. The trial against West was the organization’s first lawsuit of its kind.
Earlier in the case, a judge dismissed potentially more significant claims tied to the final released version of Hurricane, finding that the musicians had previously signed contracts assigning away certain composition royalty rights and that any oral modifications to those agreements were unenforceable without written confirmation. The plaintiffs have announced plans to appeal that ruling to the Ninth Circuit, leaving open the possibility of a second, larger trial over the interpolation claims related to the Donda version of the song.
Attorneys for West’s companies declined to comment following the verdict. A spokesperson for the artist framed the outcome as a failed attempt to extract a far larger settlement, noting that the plaintiffs had previously sought 30 million dollars and walked away with a fraction of that figure after what the spokesperson described as significant litigation costs on the plaintiffs’ side.
The trial’s final witness was West’s spokesperson and legal liaison Milo Yiannopoulos, who was called by the defense to walk jurors through invoices related to the Atlanta listening event in an effort to demonstrate that West had not profited from the show. The judge limited Yiannopoulos’s testimony after determining he was not qualified to offer expert opinion on the financial figures.
The verdict arrives during a turbulent period for West, who has faced more than a dozen copyright infringement lawsuits over the course of his career and has drawn sustained public controversy in recent years over a series of inflammatory public statements. In January, he published a full-page apology in a major newspaper attributing past conduct to untreated bipolar disorder connected to a brain injury he sustained in a 2002 car accident.
For the four composers at the center of this case, the verdict represents something more than a dollar figure. It is a precedent that independent working artists with legitimate claims can take on the music industry’s most powerful names and come out the other side with something to show for it.
